The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will increase its focus on protecting people with disabilities, older workers, LGBTQ+ individuals and temporary workers over the next five years, according to a draft strategic enforcement plan published this week in the Federal Register.
The EEOC periodically adopts a multi-year plan to establish substantive agency enforcement priorities. The plan for fiscal years 2023 through 2027 “updates and refines the EEOC’s subject matter priorities to reflect progress in achieving the EEOC’s vision of fair and inclusive workplaces with equal opportunity for all, while also recognizing the significant challenges that remain in making that vision a reality,” the agency said.
“The two previous strategic enforcement plans highlighted the enforcement priority. This one does the same thing to some extent,” Fisher Phillips attorney J. Randall Coffey told the McKnight’s Business Daily Thursday. “At the same time, it seems more generalized than the two earlier plans.”
The provisions that relate to vulnerable workers are particularly relevant to senior living and care providers, he said, as the employees often are lower paid minority and immigrant workers.
The proposed changes expand the vulnerable and underserved worker priority to include additional categories of workers who may be unaware of their rights under equal employment opportunity laws, may be reluctant or unable to exercise their legally protected rights, or historically may have been underserved by federal employment discrimination protections. This group includes people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, individuals with arrest or conviction records, LGBTQ+ individuals, temporary workers, older workers, people who work in low-wage jobs, and those with limited literacy or English proficiency.
“In some respects, I think what the EEOC has done has become so broad that it really ecompasses everything. They’ve included so many things that there really aren’t many things that aren’t included,” Coffey said. “Certainly that reflects an interest on the part of the EOOC in making sure that a whole variety of categories of protected characteristics are covered by what they’re doing, but in one sense it diffuses what the strategic enforcement plan has been in the past to some extent.”
In Coffey’s view, the EEOC has somewhat gone beyond what it initially was working toward in terms of preserving access to the legal system and it now has gone “a bit overboard to attack what at least arguably are legitimate waivers or releases or nondisparagement agreements, which are frequently what two parties in litigation want.”
The proposed plan also refines the recruitment and hiring priority to ensure that employers aren’t limiting access to on-the-job training, pre-apprenticeship or apprenticeship programs, temp-to-hire positions, internships, or other job training or advancement opportunities based on protected status, the EEOC said.
Artificial intelligence tools also are targeted in the new plan for the first time. It isn’t acceptable to use artificial intelligence or machine learning to target job advertisements, recruit applicants and make or assist in hiring decisions, according to the commission.
“If employers are aware of the ways AI and other technologies can discriminate against persons with disabilities, they can take steps to prevent it,” EEOC Chair Charlotte A. Burrows said in a statement.
Public comments to the draft plan must be submitted here on or before Feb. 9.
